Generations of Hong Kong filmmakers have worked to find a cinematic language that could capture an environment so marked by contingency and ephemerality. In recent years, one particularly original and sustained such effort has come from Chan Hau Chun, who has made several works blurring the boundaries between documentary and video art, and whose newest film debuted at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery this summer. An epistolary reflection on the city, partly addressed to a then-imprisoned friend, Map of Traces (2025) unearths fragments of Hong Kong’s collective history and forms them into an image of its present. “Memory,” she writes in one letter displayed over a black background, “is like a hidden shape, waiting for the right moment to resurface.”
Cici Wu’s current exhibition at Rockbund Art Museum, running through September 28, has been covered recently:
Artists: Ryoko Aoki, Robert Beck / Buck, Anne Eastman. Zon Ito, Yoshiro Furuhashi, Takeshi Miyakawa. Monique Mouton, Tam Ochiai, Hiroyuki Oki, Ayano Shibata, Stephen Sprott, Chinatsu Yasuhara, Cici Wu Dates: August 2 (Sat) – August 31 (Sun), 2025
Troedsson Villa is pleased to announce a group exhibition at The Pawnbroker’s Museum in Nikko, Japan. Organized by Anne Eastman and Tam Ochiai, the exhibition is titled Zureta, a word that refers to something being slightly off, displaced, out of sync, or shifted just enough to catch our attention. Whether by design or accident, when an idea, person, place, moment, or material is dislocated, the resulting imperfection opens up countless possibilities. The artists in this exhibition respond to these shifting realities. Each work points toward a fugitive memory of a place or a sense of self dislodged from its point of origin.
“Located far from the city center, on the south side of Hong Kong Island, Empty Gallery is tucked into the upper floors of a commercial skyscraper. The black-and-white projection of Chan Hau Chun’s Map of Traces (2025), the sole work and namesake of the artist’s first solo exhibition with Empty, provides the only illumination in an otherwise dark, echoey space. The film’s cloistered presentation, with the feeling of a sparsely attended microcinema screening, heightens the intimate, hushed, and quietly demanding quality of its content.”
Cici Wu is participating in 47 Canal’s Summer Screening Program, which opens July 9 and runs through August 15, 2025. Other participating artists include: Martin Beck, Danielle Dean, Andrew Hawkes, Elle Pérez, Sung Tieu and Zheng Yuan.
Clementin Seedorf are excited to announce a solo exhibition of photographs by Doris Guo, ‘Visitor’ opens on Friday 27 June from 6-9 pm in Cologne, and will be on view through 8 August 2025.
madame leniou returns—briefly—to Athens, to a domestic space: a 1936 apartment designed by Dimitris Pikionis, everything you ever wanted. Convince yourself that’s what you want. After a brief winter and unnaturally sunny but cruel spring she comes back to a life she used to have. The lifestyle spoiled. The spoils of lifestyle. […]
Participating artists include: Steve Bishop, Anna Clegg, Ian Law, Erasmia Kadinopoulou, Will Sheridan Jr., Vunkwan Tam, Constantin Thun
opening in Athens: Saturday 07 June, 2025, 3–7pm. Open through June, by appointment.
Galerie Khoshbakht is thrilled to announce the opening of the exhibition Portrait II – presenting works by Beth Collar, Behrang Karimi, Mitchell Kehe, René Kemp, Yoora Park and Raha Raissnia.
“With this exhibition we are presenting our programme to New York City. Bringing together a group of artists undoubtably will put things into perspective. Lively conjugations, visual languages, memories, material histories; they fold into each other, dragging one another by the hand. The system will be put in place. However, living these ways of instituting, putting the distant thinking on the side and allowing our own lived experience to take centre, we slowly come to the realization that institutions and programs, no matter how they express themselves, are a beautiful thing; not because we must be critical of them but because we live in them.”
Opening: Friday, May 23, 6–8 pm May 24 – June 28, 2025
ZHI Foundation in Beijing has opened a new exhibition inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, on view from May 20 2025 through March 30 2026. Participating artists include Fei Erqi, Wang Hui, Yu Zhiding, Gai Qi, Mai Trung Thu, K.C. Chww, Cheung Pak Kan, Wing-Tong Lee, Luigi Ghirri, Robert Mapplethorpe, Martin Wong, David Rappeneau. Liu Xiaodong, Liu Ye, Elizabeth Peyton, Kai Althoff, Yuichi Yokoyama, Izumi Kato, Wang Xingwei, Urs Fischer, Anri Sala, Mika Rottenberg, Allison Katz, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Sanya Kantarovsky, Yu Nishimura, Chen Fei, Firenze Lai, Tao Hui, Raphaela Simon, Brook Hsu, Sasaoka Yuriko, Taro Masushio, Hiroka Yamashita and Henry Shum.
A new wallpaper and three wall-based works by Tishan Hsu are on view at the exhibition “360°: why we paint?” at BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Sun Man, running from 16 May to 12 October 2025. A collaboration between BY ART MATTERS and Il Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Italy, the exhibition presents over a hundred works by 39 artists internationally.
Installation view of Xper. Xr: Bad Timing.
Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery
Photo: Michael Yu
繼 《Tailwhip》之後,Empty Gallery 再度為大家帶來與Xper.Xr 二度合作的展覽 《Bad Timing》,展出的是 Xper.Xr 在近三十年間首度發佈的全新創作。 Xper 在香港藝術史中的位置極具開創性及啟導性,但其成就卻一直被忽視;可以說,Xper 幾乎是以單人匹馬之力,肩負起工業音樂、無浪潮和噪音音樂共同傳承中所體現的激進個人主義和反威權主義的各種潛力在一個地區的整體表現。 《Bad Timing》中這位從未停步的煽動者重拾他擱置已久的繪畫實踐 (他前次展出畫作已是1991年在Quart Society的事),當中更出現一種反常及出人意表的轉向,直指社會人像圖。
受到香港近年因政府施政不當、政治衝突及精英棄責所帶來的低氣壓挑動, 這組全新畫作描繪一班傾向背棄公眾信義的國際社政作俑者:由金融專家、科技權威到宗教領袖。每幅人像作品皆相稱於其取自經典流行曲曲目的譏諷式標題(例如「 MTV Makes Me Want To Smoke Crack」),此可視為是 Xper在其職業生涯中對具代表性曲調假意翻唱的執迷延伸轉移到繪畫這個媒介之上,且同時把社會的權力行使與文化產業的運作深刻徹骨地聯繫起來。
取材自公開照片,Xper首先在由豬片拉展而成的圓面上繪畫指涉人物的相像,然後對這人像進行類儀式性塗污,這種表現主義式的朦朧處理,使得出來的畫面充滿了人造膿液、粘液和其他物質所造成的耀目沉積床。這些帶宣洩性(並且非常幽默)的糟蹋痕跡指向這些作品是出自私人表演的隱密領域。它們暗示自身的功能是作為 Xper (可能是失敗的)治療嘗試以從他心智景觀中驅除某些特定公眾人物所帶來的毒性影響——一種在個體經驗與媒體認可共識現實兩者間邊界日益多孔的文化時刻中強而有力的關聯脈衝。然而,如果這些畫作籍它們的表現力在姿態上指向一種理想的控制,在這樣做之時它們是充分了解到這只是一種出自青少年幻想式的簡單動作——缺乏任何真正的政治效力,帶出的只是以黑色至極的幽默作為潛在阻力的一種形式。
雖然《Bad Timing》展出的人像畫作為宣洩憤怒多少帶著真摯的出口可能發揮了很好的作用,但就如 Xper 其他的創作實踐般,它們充斥著矛盾和自我破壞、死路和拐錯彎:在私下操縱中成自動毀滅的悲喜劇物品。它們預演甚至沈醉於其自身的社政失敗,把批評——藝術資本最吹噓的形式——搬演為自我撕破的鬧劇。這組畫作與觀者及彼此交換著合謀的目光,作為一個整體它們又似乎表達出一種了解恐懼的感覺:鬼崇惡意的一種模仿,或是潛伏於宏莊詭計背後一種龐大而可怕共謀的輪廓。當其優雅地指使空間的中央位置讓路予迷宮般的黑暗時,《Bad Timing》 讓人聯想到社政的未來不僅已被取消了回贖權,並且以某種方式故意妥協了——受制於一種永遠潛伏在我們集體意識邊緣之外的幽暗共識。